Throughout my life i have always had a fight within in accepting myself. Accept all my flaws and who I really am. I am starting now, slowly, to re understand it, but before I had been struggling a lot and I still do sometimes.
I guess it’s also because of my job. Because I am a dancer, it’s always a lot of putting on a mask by being under pressure.
Trying to always be strong and perfect because we always aim for perfection.
But I am slowly starting to understand myself with age and accepting my flaws and make them be something actually better for my dancing for example or my art or my life itself.
Before I didn’t know what was going on with me but the last six years I started to acknowledge it. I wasn’t actually taking the time to analyze it. So I think that when it hit me, I knew I had to slow down and take the time.
I realized through the years that I needed an internal search. It’s actually more about myself. Sometimes I felt judged by everyone else, but actually my kind of judgment was coming from me.
I had to accept to be who I was.
To be gay for instance.
Two summers ago I came out to my mother. Just saying that I am gay, a huge weight was lifted. My body changed, all the blockage I had that was making me injured during my ballet career slowly disappeared. I am feeling much happier. I am feeling much stronger. I think this is one of the acceptance of my own self that I was trying to avoid, or I didn’t know what it was. I have been confused as well in that area. Because I grew up Catholic in a small town in Sicily, in the south of Italy. I grew up not knowing it even existed, homosexuality and or being with a man. So for me that was really difficult to acknowledge.
Also I have always been very prude about my body and being naked.
I never liked myself before and I never felt comfortable being naked in front of other people.
In the last year I have been trying to push myself and my boundaries and do things that before made me really uncomfortable to now realize that every fear is surmountable .
I think we always learn something new about ourselves, as long as we leave the space to explore and take the time to understand.